Well, I’ve finally had what I consider to be ample time to check out every nook and cranny of the SwitchVox AA60 VoIP , and I’ll stand by the belief that SwitchVox is the best Asterisk variant available, and not just because of its slick user interface. (For what it’s worth, Polycom owns the sound quality battlefield, too.)

One of the coolest things about SwitchVox is called Panels, which are web service apps that you can run in your web browser when attached to the SwitchVox server. When a call comes in, or some other event occurs on the phone system, your panels can perform certain behavior–like display a virtual switchboard or the status of a call queue.  Or, my current favorite, the Google Maps panel, which displays the location of the caller based on the caller’s area code and prefix.

There are a few problems with Panels, though.  For one, there doesn’t seem to be enough adoption of the Panels idea in the industry. That is to say, you can’t just go download cool new panels the way you can download Dashboard Widgets or iPhone apps.  So, the few Panels that are freely available in the marketplace, while nifty, serve as little more than props for the idea of Panels, concept demos if you will.

One of the programs I’ve been experimenting with is Now Software‘s Now Up-To-Date and Contact, a contact management / quasi-CRM package from the fellas a few miles south of me in Columbus.  I’m really digging this program, but as I’ve begun to envision how I might combine Now Contact with a telephone system such as SwitchVox, the integration becomes a daunting task.  I’d like to be able to trigger web service events from what Digium calls “SwitchVox URLs” (get requests that occur when certain telephony events happen) that point to the server where my Now Contact data is stored to, say, set up an automated dialer, or better yet, journal incoming and outgoing calls.

Of course, the folks at Now are knee-deep in their as-yet-unreleased flagship product, Nighthawk, and I believe that, architecturally, the Now people are keeping an open mind about VoIP interfaces and XML web services-the two things that could make Asterisk users (numbering in the 100′s of thousands) absolutely lust for Nighthawk.

Indeed, adding a combination of simple SIP signaling and XML web-service functionality to Nighthawk and then setting it alongside Asterisk/SwitchVox would create a CRM/contact-center system so potent that even fearless old Cisco might tremble.  After all, Cisco’s Express contact management and CallManager are a hair more expensive than Now’s products and SwitchVox, even if Cisco stuff could be dumbed down for SMBs.

So I’m encouraged by what I’m seeing from Now Software, but equally excited about SwitchVox, so back to the AA60.  Configuring hunt patterns and call cascading was kind of a pain at first, probably because I’m so accustomed to doing it on other systems, most notably plain vanilla Asterisk, but now that I’ve got the hang of it on SwitchVox, I realized how dead simple they’ve made it.

I can’t wait to see future revs on the user interface. The AA60′s response time loading web page was a bit less than snappy, and there are elements of the user interface that shouldn’t require full blown page loads, so I would love to see Ajax used heavily in future revs.

In a future post I’ll talk about how phone provisioning differs on SwitchVox versus Jazinga, and I’ll also cover setting up a soft phone on SwitchVox and describe the interesting experience I’ve had with Junction Networks this week.